As if to underscore Mitt Romney's indifference to the 47 percent, his Republican Party colleagues in the US Senate used a procedural vote Wednesdayto block a $1 billion bipartisan bill that would have given tens of thousands of jobless military vets the opportunity to work.

Inspired by President Obama's State of the Union Address challenge to get veterans working, the Veterans Job Corps bill would have created a program to fast-track 20,000 former service members into federal jobs as law enforcement officers, first responders, and parks workers. The legislation "was one of the few pieces of legislation [to] make it through Congress, which has been mired in partisan gridlock for the last two years," reports Stars & Stripes' Leo Shane. A few enthusiastic Republicans even added several provisions to the bill, including measures to increase internet access for job-seeking vets and to aid them in their transitions from military life. "Once it incorporated ideas from both sides of the aisle, I thought it would be an easy sell," Tom Tarantino, a war vets' lobbyist, told the Washington Post Wednesday.

But This Morning, Politico Reported That The Mother Jones Video Was Selectively Edited To Give A False Impression About Mitt Romney’s Views On The Middle East Peace Process. "But the clip initially provided by Mother Jones does not include that part of his remarks, and therefore was not reported by the aforementioned news outlets. Romney's complete remarks about the Mideast peace process were included in the complete video Mother Jones published Tuesday afternoon, less than 24 hours after it released clips from the fundraiser. But the clip posted to the Mother Jones website, which was cited by the national media, cuts out the excerpt in which Romney says that 'American strength, American resolve' will cause the Palestinians to 'some day reach the point where they want peace more than we're trying to force peace on them.'" (Dylan Byers, "Technically, Romney Said Peace Was Possible," Politico, 9/19/12)

The Romney campaign was clearly implying the whole video was rubbish. But there's a slight problem. Politico's Dylan Byers, the source for the debunking charge, quickly noted that he had done no such thing. He wrote:

there is nothing in my report that "debunks" the video.

In his article, posted earlier in the day, Byers had noted how some folks were complaining that we had edited a long clip of Romney talking about the Middle East selectively. In that clip—watch it here—Romney trashed the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, said the Palestinians (whom he lumped into one mindset) did not want peace and only sought the destruction of Israel, that he would not actively pursue the peace process and would instead seek to "kick the ball down the field," and that he had paid no real attention when a former secretary of state had told him that peace might be possible in the Middle East.

That is a total diss of the peace process—and would represent a radical break with US policy, which has supported a two-state solution since the Clinton years.

Yet Romney went on to say—and this clip did not include this—that if the United States showed "resolve….the Palestinians will some day reach the point where they want peace more than we're trying to force peace on them." Thus, peace might be theoretically possible at some point in the distance.

This was not a case of selective editing. The point was to show what was newsworthy: Romney breaking with current policy and stating views that he has not stated publicly. (In an interview this summer, he said he supported a two-state solution.) Nevertheless, some Romney backers have cried foul and managed to turn this into a dispute they can use to raise questions about the secret Romney tape.

But don't take my word. Here's more from Byers:

More mysterious still, is why the Romney campaign wants to debunk a video containing remarks that the candidate doubled-down on in a follow-up press conference.

By calling the whole tape "debunked" and "selectively edited," the campaign's hewing closer to the Breitbart.com argument -- the real story is liberal media-Obama collusion. And the result is a sort of paradox, in which Romney stands by what he said in a video that you can't trust.

It was bizarre. After Byers and Weigel had debunked the Romney camp's debunking, Byers heard from a Romney aide who said that the campaign only takes issue with the clip regarding Romney's view on the Mideast, not the entire video.

In other words, the Romney campaign walked back the push-back. It's not challenging the "47 percent" material or anything else; only the Mideast remarks. But, as I've said a few thousand times on televisionthese past few days, the wonderful thing about this story is that people can view for themselves. Watch Romney talking about the Mideast, and it's clear he has contempt for the peace process as it has been conceived for years; does not believe it can work; and would chart a radically different course. The few sentences not included in that clip—but which were included in the full transcript and complete tape we released—do not a debunking make. This maneuver smacks of desperation from a campaign hurt by the undeniable words of its candidate.

Our DC Bureau Chief David Corn, who broke the story of the secret Romney fundraiser videos (full video, full transcript), discusses their political fallout with MSNBC's Martin Bashir. In the videos, Romney insults half the country while pandering to supporters at the $50,000 per plate dinner. Can he turn around the campaign around with the presidential debate in two weeks?

David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He's also on Twitter.

Mitt Romney made light of his father's Mexican roots in a secretly recorded video in Florida, joking that if he were Latino, his path to 270 electoral votes would be a lot easier. But it turns out that the Mexican joke was just a lead-in to a riff about Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, the former Obama adviser and Harvard Law School professor who's taking on Sen. Scott Brown this fall. Warren, you may recall, found herself in a bit of trouble this spring when the Boston Herald reported that she had identified herself to her Harvard employers as Native American. Romney, speaking in May as the story was unraveling, had some fun at her expense:

ROMNEY: My dad you probably know was the governor of Michigan and was the head of a car company, but he was born in Mexico. And had he been born of Mexican parents, I'd have a better shot of winning this, but he was unfortunately born to Americans living in Mexico and he lived there for a number of years. I mean I say that jokingly, but it'd be helpful to be a Latino.

DONOR: Pull an Elizabeth Warren!

ROMNEY: That's right I could go out and say—for those who don't know Elizabeth Warren, she is the woman who's running for US Senate in Massachusetts who says that she is Cherokee, has put her application over the years that she is Cherokee, and Harvard put down that she's one of their minority faculty members. It turns out that at most that she's 1/32 Cherokee and even that can't be proven. So in any event, I can put down my dad was born in Mexico and leave it at that.

The Israeli press gave some attention Wednesday morning to Mother Jones Washington Bureau Chief David Corn's reporting on the video of Mitt Romney at a closed fundraiser, and understandably so: The tape caught the Republican presidential candidate saying that peace between Israelis and Palestinians was "unthinkable," and he would handle the issue by "kick[ing] the ball down the field." Popular tabloid Maariv (who called Mitt "big mouth") and the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz featured Romney's remarks prominently on their front pages.

Israel HaYom is seen as very supportive of Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his right-wing Likud party. Israeli-American historian Gershom Gorenberg notes, however, that "[O]n the Palestinians, [Romney] has not actually parroted Netanyahu; he has placed himself to Netanyahu's right. The Israeli prime minister, after all, has at least paid lip service to a two-state agreement." Then again, lip service to the two state solution is exactly what Romney has provided in public, his just speaks differently in quiet rooms.

To paraphrase Vice President Joe Biden: This is a big effing deal. Conservative nonprofits are among the biggest spenders in the 2012 election cycle. ProPublicareported in mid-August that just two such groups—Crossroads GPS and the Americans for Prosperity—had pumped $60 million into presidential TV ads. At the time, that was more than all super-PACs combined. Indeed, for all the attention paid to super-PACs, dark-money nonprofits are the bigger political players; in the 2010 elections, nonprofits outspent super-PACs by a 3-to-2 margin, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity and Center for Responsive Politics.

Tuesday's court ruling didn't completely rule out beefed-up disclosure for nonprofit groups, as the appeals court left the door open for the Federal Election Commission to revisit the disclosure rules. (That's unlikely, given the level of dysfunction over at the FEC.) But the decision dealt a stinging blow to pro-reform lawmakers and advocacy organizations that want the public to know who's funding dark-money outside groups. "The Court of Appeals' decision today will keep the American people, for the time being, in the dark about who is attempting to influence their vote with secret money," Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who brought the suit to shine a light on dark money, said in a statement.

The Center for Individual Freedom, a dark money-funded group that fights disclosure laws at the state and federal level, hailed the decision. "CFIF believes that the right to engage in political speech should not be needlessly conditioned upon the loss of anonymity," a CFIF attorney told the Los Angeles Times. CFIF was one of two groups that appealed a lower court decision this spring that forcing nonprofits to reveal certain donors.

Well, I don't know what he was referring to, but I can tell you this. When I won in 2008, 47 percent of the American people voted for John McCain, they didn't vote for me. And what I said on election night was, even though you didn't vote for me, I hear your voices and I'm going to work as hard as I can to be your president. And one of the things I’ve learned as president is you represent the entire country. And when I meet Republicans as I'm traveling around the country, they are hard working, family people, who care deeply about this country and my expectation is that if you want to be president you got to work for everybody not just for some.